What Would Jesus Do About Those "Death Panels"?

I am pretty clear about how I'd like to die.

First of all -- later, much later; but if I had my preferences, not as late as my father, who suffered through a long dementia. Now he was the quintessential brave man and he soldiered on, even with increasing sweetness, as his disease progressed. He was enough himself that he knew what was happening at each sad stage. I would rather not have to bear that burden as long as he did!

I think though that at the far end of the journey, he could no longer figure out how to surface from the confusions that pulled at him. It seemed like that to me, and it seemed that he chose then to dive off the cliff into that dark night, cooperating fully with what was coming. He showed no sign of fear, and when I think about it the same words always come to mind: He died expeditiously.

I am not expecting that much fortitude from myself, and I hope I don't have to watch my mind shatter in stages as I go, but I would like to meet the process with what faculties I still have. I hope for a short illness, a little time to see the Reaper coming, and prepare; and then to die in the daylight, preferably in sunlight, to see what It Is, that last experience in a body's weight of sensations that I have pulled along with me through life.

I'd like a short illness, not too many pain-killers and quiet.

What I don't want is: To be still taking vitamins and cholesterol meds at the end, or that high blood pressure stuff that seems a little silly in the face of multiple organ failures.

I don't want to be in the throes of chemotherapy, or to die after consuming an expensive course of treatment or a grossly expensive series of tests. I hope my doctor sees my death coming too, and after he tells me, revises my meds to avoid wasting them on vain struggle.

I REALLY don't want to leave my widower a huge hospital bill that he can't pay, for treatment no one expected to restore me to a decent, aware life.

Are you hearing euthanasia here?

Not so much. I have taken gravely to heart the Christian insight that it is our mortality that forms our whole being. I believe it and I am, in that small sense, not afraid of it at all. After a life brimming with kinesthetic awareness -- I may have been a lawyer, but I used to dance -- I could not love my physical being more, nor be more intensely curious about that last grotesque experience. I see this as a former dancer's way of thanking God for the gift of physical life, and if I want to go to it by a more direct path than modern medicine wants to offer me (not talking suicide here; just judicious selection of alternative therapies) I will not have the duller of my purported co-religionists stepping in to tell me that I must cling to life in some other prescribed way instead.

I have taken to heart as well the American Dream; and I will not be denied the right to direct my own passing, as much of it as God leaves to me that is!

{ Shame on Sarah Palin and Charles Grassley for lying (Sarah) and dissembling (Charles) about things like this, the Things of God. }

Queen Anne's Lace

I see my last post was in winter.

Some things don't change. The weather has continued odd. The financial crisis has worsened.

Some things do change. One thing to note is: Even in a "Cold Summer," lots of things grow well. Grass grows nicely when it's wet -- never fully reliable in Wisconsin any more, but most of this summer has been adequately lubricated.

Weeds almost grow better in the cold; profusion, really. I think they must be more cold tolerant than what we Europeans brought with us. Anyway, they grow, while tomatoes hang sullenly green or refuse to fruit at all and corn pushes skyward without cobs. A cold green paradise without appealing foods till the berries thrust up in mid-summer, and suddenly the richness began -- swollen blueberries, a rich garnet setting of mulberries on every mulberry tree and the Queen of All Berries, the tangy and succulent raspberry.

After that, I sensed it -- the crops are beginning to come in and though I longed for richer things, I can see that the land is productive even if not quite in what I prefer.

The truth is that what I prefer in Summer is Heat, yet here on August 15 was the first of the Hot Summer Nights we need before the next winter sets in.

I guess there were a few before, although I know it wasn't many. Maybe 5. Every time it got hot, a front came in and the temps rocketed back down, but there were those few nights. I missed most of them, busy with work and long commutes.

Tonight though I finally had the time to take a walk, in air thick with moisture, leavened only with an insistent breeze.

I tell you, it's not enough. I'll need a month of these -- not likely, either! -- to be ready for the annual freeze-up, and yet I felt myself opening up and threatening to be lost in the sheer physicality of friendly temperatures, in the human body range. A suggestion that the moisture in the air and the water in my veins and skin might well find a way to merge and give me for a moment a god's-eye glimpse of how it all hangs together on earth.

All the beautiful things amid their tragic short endings. Me thinking that even if I died tonight, I couldn't say it was a life cut short. All the muscles still work well enough too, and the aches and pains are far from overwhelming for my age. Luckier than I have had a right to ask; I think luckier even than I ever did ask after my short list of demands on the universe was met when I met my husband.

I think I have a summer spirit, easily pleased, here in this frosty land; and I think that will have to remain our little secret because my business, really, is sterner stuff.

I am a financial lawyer, after all.

But in this late summer, when Queen Anne's lace pushes up joyfully on every untended bank and the garden begins to gallop toward harvest, I've got a secret that most of the time I don't even dream of: It is enough.

Someone May Need to be a Weatherman After All

A weather report while I wait: Birdsong outside this morning! I had forgotten that was gone. Saw my first ducks and geese fly in about 10 days ago; had forgotten that they were gone but the set-down approach to landing is distinctive. I saw some pairs first, and then one "v" form in the sky. Eventually the sky will be laced with them, like pencil marks in the margins of a book.

And red-winged blackbirds in the field! I forgot that they were gone too. My mother says they're just flying through, and will summer further north. All these realities you notice and soak in from the land around you.

A social security judge flew in from Pasadena for hearings though. It was about 12 (F) degrees at mid-day. My attorney-girlfriend said the judge appeared simply stunned by the weather, and it has been a black, heavy sort of winter, the melting snow laced with dirt. Snow flakes themselves are a kind of tonic; heavy, melting drifts, not so much.

My friend shared her story of snow-shoeing to work in December after one of the blizzards. She's guessing the judge will never forget it, or maybe will forget it at once because it just doesn't seem real.

A lot of people are going to lose their homes. Our loan broker "knowledge workers" sold products that otherwise solvent people are never going to be able to pay; much less the grandiose dreamers who bought the adjustable products.

Where's the rage? We're raging against neighbors who might get better deals than we do if they slide into foreclosure? It makes more sense to rage against the bureaucrats who are giving those deals, yes, but where is the rage against the "small government" / "tax cuts will cure cancer" crew? I think I have never seen anything as amazing as the furtive bands of republicans surging through the weeds, muttering "Bush betrayed us and Obama is not a citizen ..."

Oh, man; I just heard a crane call, a much bigger sound than the other birds! Spring then, too early and less secure than we all thought. There are things here worth saving; where is the rage? Where are the brains?

Who Let the Snakes In?

I'm often sad, these days, that there are so many sibilants in Nancy Pelosi's name. People are so ready to hiss it, anyway, to express visceral hatred.

I, who still wish I could be Nancy Pelosi when I grow up, find this moronic. Nancy Pelosi is effective and attractive at an age when most women fade into a shapeless softness, saving their tongue-lashings for hapless daughters-in-law and wayward children. Nancy Pelosi, instead, is waging a daily battle to rescue a nation dragged almost into insolvency by a feckless President in the grip of mindless devotions himself.

George Bush betrayed the truth for a fantasy Christianity and a fantasy realpolitik of successfully being the biggest bully on the block. I'm so surprised no one but me (with my minuscule readership!) writes about the terrible internal inconsistency of those two. I guess secular commentators have made up their minds about the spiritual bankruptcy of a religion that blesses pre-emptive war. Such has been George Bush's Christian testimony.

Bush and McCain then went on, as our economy collapsed under the lies of the Unregulated Rich, to prescribe that fantasy nostrum as a cure: Tax cuts! Oh yes, the Rich having scuttled the ship with their bonuses intact, we should mortgage the future to make it safe for them to profit in new ventures! We being the middle class people without health insurance or retirement investments, journeying into old age (or raising young children) in a country the rich no longer feel allegiance to.

It does need to be said that true patriots would not have acted as the Lords of Finance did in the '90's.

The truth is that Nancy Pelosi is correct: It's time to save the rest of us from the destroyers of the Republican True Believer crew; and they will never forgive her for that. I admire her unwillingness to quail before them. The woman doesn't seem to know how to quail!

And while I do call on her to put her own financial house in order -- she, like all who became rich in the Lying Decades just past owes the rest of us a great deal -- I will give her time to figure that out.

Right now there is an emergency, and the hissing sibilants on the public scene are coming from the perpetrators, refusing to admit what they have done to the country (and some of them, to the religion) to which they say they are devoted.

Maybe we are blessed, after all, that the Speaker's name has sibilants. It brings out so clearly the true heart of the opposition she faces.

Just Say No

No great fan of Nancy (or Ronald) Reagan, I still honor the usefulness of her simple anti-drug phrase. Now I apply it to the culture, and I am nervous about where it may take me. Watching Barack Obama take office, I plumb the my doubts about my country. Can we live without the things we never should have accepted? Can we even assemble an appropriate list.

Perhaps if I start with the things that were obvious to me, their offensiveness shocking me as people around me nodding in sage acceptance:

When did a "Christian nation" ever even imagine, much less adopt as political writ, the idea that if we must fight, it is better to take the fight to the enemy's homeland than to endure it in our own? {Note to the perplexed, right here where I am now, we are a Christian nation. If this doesn't include you, don't feel left out! It's just a fact here.}

I am so dazzled by that one, I think I need to take a break before going further ...

Sirod

Did I ever say how I played violin in high school? I stopped
practicing enough -- boy-crazy -- and now I regret it.

There was, and is, also something unsatisfying to my about Western
stringed instruments. The one instrument that sounded exactly right
to me, enough to make me want to play it, was the sirod, a sort of
Indian metal and wood guitar -- the metallic tones to the sound
rounded out the whole tone for me. Beautiful stuff, but I was long
past the age to pick up an instrument, or even to want to. I've
never been that fond of the piano either, a little too predictable.

Or I would have said but Thursday I heard a piano-violin duet, violin by David Oistrakh, that was just stunning. Both instruments had a liquid, silvery tone that you just can't get all the time, the tone I always miss in them. Who knew this was possible?

I see there's a new offering at NetFlix, a movie of Oistrakh's life.
If I just had the patience to finish signing up for NetFlix, but in
this busy, busy life -- not so much!

It must also be time for me to contribute to NPR -- I spend a lot of time on the road and I can't stand to listen to another whining country song.

For the last time, fella, it is NOT enough to stop thinking when you set up a household and reproduce. You've got to keep thinking and learning all your life ... or did you think the Founding Fathers' main goal was to make the world safe for truck driving and self-medication? Did you think when Christ commended little children that he meant that only simplistic ideas should darken the instincts of a Christian?

Did you think all this was supposed to be easy? Listen to some violin music today, or some sirod, and imagine what complexity can do!

Best Day

This is the Best Day! Thanksgiving in adulthood has quietly become my favorite holiday. Christmas is a better party and it might be more irreplaceable. Easter is sublime but more a feast (religious, that is) than a holiday.

Thanksgiving comes though after the exertions of early Fall. It's a welcome rest in the way that those other two holidays never are. (You can see we do it quietly at our house; no dramatic, huge spreads. I'm not that much of a cook that I invite the whole neighborhood over!)

It's secular religion-lite too. You couldn't have it without the impulse of Christianity and the peculiar weather and early history of the United States, and it suits us. Autumn is a Northern hemisphere glory and perhaps more in the maple forests of the new world than in the old.

It makes sense to celebrate before the hard winter sets in, and there's precious little animism abroad in the U.S.. We don't set bon-fires to appease dark spirits that we don't entirely believe in but we do pause before the onset of that winter, bigger than we are, that reminds us of our status on earth as invited guests.

I hope we continue to remember. We have often been greedy or unruly guests, ruining what we touch. That's not okay. I hope we remember, and I sense, each Thanksgiving, that most of us do and for that I am grateful.

So on this day, fractious as I often am at other times, I feel comfortable and at home, where I am, a member of the group.